A fully featured storage solution may include raw disks, a file system, snapshots, file versioning, compression, encryption, built-in capacity optimization (e.g., data deduplication), other security features such as auditing and tamper resistance, efficient replication to an off-site location for disaster recovery purposes, and so forth. Many of these features are delivered in separate appliances that then have to be connected by highly experienced technicians.
Constructing such a storage solution with today's technology, for many terabytes (TBs) of data, often results in a multi-box solution that can easily exceed costs of $100,000, making such a fully featured storage solution not available to many businesses and customers.
This multi-box, ad-hoc solution is not a fundamental aspect of storage, but rather that file system architectures and implementations have not kept up with other technology developments. For example, most file system architectures have not evolved to fully leverage the faster computer processing units (CPUs), flash memory, and the different balance between network bandwidth, disk density and disk access rates.
If one defines data accessibility as the ratio of access bandwidth to addressable storage, the accessibility of data is decreasing. Storage densities are increasing faster than the access to the disks, so for a given data set size, the time needed to access the data is increasing (and thus causing reduced accessibility). The effect on storage architectures is as follows: once one stores the data, one should not move it unless absolutely necessary. This simple observation is violated many times in current storage architectures where data is constantly being read in and written out again. The result is significant extra expense (e.g., 10 channels, CPU, power, time, management).